"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another..." When Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963, it was attacked for being frightening and ugly - no American child would behave this way, it was said. Children, however, got on with loving the book and to date, it's sold 17m copies. Who the Wild Things are (Radio 4, Saturday)m, which you can listen to here was a joyful exploration of its magic (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c5j0j).

Sendak, now 80, was interviewed and proved to have a bone-dry wit. The wild things, he felt, were probably based on his aunts and uncles - as a child he felt "they came to our house far too often and ate all our food". The creatures, in fact, were nearly wild horses, but Sendak found them too difficult to draw.

There was lots of enjoyable dissection of why the book works so well - "the wild things are obviously id fragments - something inside every kid" - and discussion of how its lack of moralism was revolutionary in the 1960s, but the most revealing part of the programme was when some six-year-olds were asked about the book. "The lion one reminds me of my mum - he's always angry and she's always angry," said one. Sendak still gets letters from small fans. One read, "Dear Mr Sendak, how much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it's not expensive my sister and I want to spend the summer there. Please answer soon."

You don't get any analysis or exposition on Words and Music, but that's one of its strengths. This week's programme, which you can listen again to here, Feasting With Panthers, which you can listen to here, took the theme of same-sex love, with actors Helen McCrory and Douglas Hodge reading poetry and prose over a rich selection of music. There were Sappho, Lord Alfred Douglas, Walt Whitman, as you might expect, but also Doris Day singing Secret Love from Calamity Jane and the jaunty sniping of Mischa Spoliansky's When the Secret Girlfriend. It was a gorgeous selection that demonstrated how allusive and discreet gay lovers have had to be down the centuries.

From subtlety and brilliance to something else entirely, Radio 2 Comedy Greats tackled Benny Hill (listen to the programme here). Comedian Ben Miller talked up Hill's claims to be a "comedy innovator and TV pioneer" and promised, "if you think you know the Benny Hill story, it's time to think again". This sounded intriguing but the show did little to back up these assertions. There were plenty of clips of Hill, sounding very dated and unfunny ("There's the wife, feeding the pigs. She's the one with the hat on") with people like Tony Blackburn insisting, "it's just seaside-postcard fun, really . . . nothing wrong with that". As comedy tastes changed and his ratings fell, Hill's TV show was cancelled. "Benny never really became the comedy pariah that some have painted him as," Miller said. It felt like faint praise.

There were real laughs to be had, and plenty of them, on Just a Minute (Radio 4, Sunday), the last in the current series, which you can listen to here. The mood was already rather hysterical ("When I look at that beautiful masculine form I can't help but think of King Kong" said Paul Merton of host Nicholas Parsons) when Gyles Brandreth was given the topic of "pretentious vocabulary". Off he went, unstoppably, unleashing a torrent of verbal flourishes. So unstoppable, in fact, that they let him go beyond the full minute. Moments later, Brandreth was emboldened to assert that he has no hair on his body at all. "Show us your chest," suggested Parsons. "Dear Lord," muttered Pauline McLyn. "Off, off, off!" chanted the audience. "What on earth," asked Graham Norton, "has happened to Radio 4?"